If you have not played around with this yet, go ahead and try it. I believe it is among the many new features at the “new” LDS.org church website, and it is certainly one of the most amusing ones. You can instantly transpose keys (helpful for choir, aspiring but not yet fully functional pianists, and adaptation to other musical instruments), increase, decrease beat, etc. It’s quite nice! Try it out if you have a bored moment…

My wife and I have recently been re-watching the sessions of this last General Conference, which we “tivo-ed”. In my opinion, this is one of the most spiritually powerful General Conferences I have seen. Maybe I am just sorely in need of spiritual enlightenment- which is always true, but I was genuinely touched in life-altering ways by much of what was said over the conference center pulpit at the beginning of this month. I count it among the “tender mercies of the Lord” that so many spoke directly to my soul about real problems and issues I am currently facing and helped me to feel my Savior’s love so clearly. Here are some of the promises and quotes that touched me the most this last conference: Read the rest of this entry »

PRELIMINARY NOTE: The following is based on my personal experiences and opinion of what President Boyd K. Packer’s talk entitled “The Mantle is Far, Far Greater Than The Intellect,” originally given on August 22, 1981, at a religious educator’s symposium at BYU. Please keep that context in mind. Read the rest of this entry »

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

While driving alone the 26 miles into work from my comfortable suburban home to downtown Dallas the other day, I heard on NPR a reference to a game I could play to see “how many ‘Earths’ of natural resources it would take to sustain all 6.6 billion humans… if everyone lived like [me].” Read the rest of this entry »

When I was a Ward Mission Leader recently, one of the Assistants to the Mission President (“AP”) had the idea for a quarterly theme to help motivate the missionaries and to bring down the blessings of God for our mission. The unfortunate title he chose for this campaign: “BIND THE LORD”. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I reminded a colleague of the oft-quoted maxim in patent law that “a patent may not, like a ‘nose of wax,’ be twisted one way to avoid anticipation [finding of invalidity because something in the prior art already did what the patent describes] and another to find infringement.” He just looked at me blankly and asked “what in the world is a ‘nose of wax’?!?” and suggested that I must be making that up or misquoting something. Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight I had one of the worst experiences a person can have. I attended the open-casket viewing of 21 month old Matthew, a dear friend of our family and a frequent guest at our house. It was absolutely gut-wrenching to hear the racking sobs of his distraught mother standing next to him, holding his limp little body and repeating half-coherently “I don’t want to say goodbye” as she stroked his hair and held his cold little toddler hand. It tore a hole in my heart to walk past the cherubic, colorless face with eyes closed, a face that just last week had brightened our home and our lives with infinite color and eyes that then sparkled blue as he laughed and played at our feet with our children. Read the rest of this entry »